To acknowledge the absolute, but only in relative terms, only for the sake of the advantages you have to gain by it, to keep it always at arms length, retaining the initiative, to have this state of affairs go on endlessly. Nothing could be further from your wishes than to surrender to it, to merge with it. To be in orbit around it, to have it as art, to make an absolute out of art, as if it could be made safe in that way.

Most of your motives are negotiable, existing in a context of competing alternative motives, but there are some which are absolute, which cannot be compromised on and hence have an existential life-and-death quality, are thus primary motives and so are part o the very context of more ordinary motives. This is well understood and not just intuitively but as a theme for reflection and narrative. It may be that in earlier times all motives had that absolute quality, as appears with infants, and that the negotiable kind are an achievement of maturity and also of decadence, and so the absolute kind which are not chosen but happen to you are much romanticised. Does this point to something about consciousness, even if only on its mode of connection to mind? The consciousness-mind problem is even more salient than the mind-body problem.

Desire is historical, its origin and its adventures matter, and this is so even when the origin is falsified by the culture or be internal pressures of substitution and concealment. There is something like a primal scene of desire, usually in early childhood when the imagination is so vividly engaged that its fantasy is found to be more real than reality; and hence its direct connection to intimacy. Of course there are different desires and different, although far fewer, origins. Re-experiencing the origin of a desire weakens it, so desire itself paradoxically desires the forgetting of its source.

Consciousness is what enables experience, any experience at all, and so there is no experience of consciousness. In the same way consciousness is not, it does not possess being, it is void in relation to being. Experience which is something integrated in time, belongs to soul, for want of a better term, and the being of soul is consciousness, and so is void. It is only the belief that soul has substantial being on a par with the content of experience, that it is grounded in substance that leads it on the wayward path of metaphysics.

Simply perceiving some object, external or internal, does not coincide with 'intentionality' since this latter concept with its implication of intent, or of potential intent, adds a directionality, a vector to the perceiving, one that goes from you to the object. In this way it begs the question of the 'natural attitude' which is what is to be laid aside - intended to be laid aside. The perceiving precedes directionality, which if it is added on, can go in any direction. Allowing it to point from the object towards you, whatever you might be, the natural attitude is either gone or reappears simply as another possible object.

Consciousness, nothing in itself, enters reality through the portal of time and in the many ways in which it grasps onto time, its identification of willful rejection of such permanence as it is offered, by memory or identification, only underlines that it has no temporality of its own. To let go of the world is to let go of time, what other principle of being can it have?

The ego or system of the self organises and prioritises the diverse desires and motives that crowd in on you from multiple contexts and in this way staves off chaos, but it does this by fully engaging with desire, serving as its existential support and promoter. The only thing it has to offer, and what enables it to perform this function is its claim to the sense of being. It does not possess being but, as it were, it deputises for being, represents it via a pre-reflective cogito. By generously giving something it doesn't have it gets as close as can be to actually having it. This role play would be empty if it were not so committed to desire.